dkb - Developer Knowledge Base

Local documentation manager for vibe coding with Claude Code.

Local .md files > MCP

Install

# Install with uv
uv tool install dkb

# Or with pipx
pipx install dkb

Usage

$ dkb -h
usage: dkb [-h] {add,remove,update,status,skill} ...

dkb v2.0.0

Developer Knowledge Base - Fetch and organize documentation locally for vibe coding with Claude Code

positional arguments:
  {add,remove,update,status,skill}
                        Available commands
    add                 Add a new repository
    remove              Remove a repository
    update              Update repositories
    status              Show status of all repositories
    skill               Regenerate the Claude Code skill

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Examples:
  dkb add https://github.com/denoland/docs.git
  dkb add tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/src/docs
  dkb add gramiojs/documentation/docs --version-url gramiojs/gramio
  dkb add https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/tree/main/docs
  dkb add https://codeberg.org/owner/repo/src/branch/main/docs
  dkb remove tailwind
  dkb update
  dkb status

# Add a repository (entire repo)
$ dkb add https://github.com/denoland/docs.git

📦 Adding docs...
   ✓ 2.4.2
   ✓ Updated /Users/you/.claude/skills/dkb/SKILL.md

# Show status with rich formatting
$ dkb status

                                    Knowledge Base Status
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Repository   ┃ Version ┃ Docs                     ┃ Source                  ┃ Last Updated ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ better-auth  │ 1.2.12  │ better-auth/better-auth  │ -                       │ 25m ago      │
│ deno         │ 2.4.2   │ denoland/docs            │ denoland/deno           │ 25m ago      │
│ nextjs       │ 15.4.2  │ vercel/next.js           │ -                       │ 24m ago      │
│ tailwind     │ 4.1.11  │ tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com │ tailwindlabs/tailwindcss │ 12m ago      │
│ uv           │ 0.8.0   │ astral-sh/uv             │ -                       │ 33m ago      │
└──────────────┴─────────┴──────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┴──────────────┘

# Update all repositories (parallel with live progress)
$ dkb update

  ✓ deno            updated
  - nextjs          unchanged
  - tailwind        unchanged
  - uv              unchanged

Updated: deno
   ✓ Updated /Users/you/.claude/skills/dkb/SKILL.md

Configuration

Two files, two owners:

The catalogue is the declaration and is meant to be tracked in a dotfiles repo. dkb update reconciles the cache with it: clones anything declared that is missing, refreshes anything that changed upstream, re-reads every version and description, prunes clones nobody declares, and regenerates the skill; it exits 1 if any repo failed. Without a declared branch, a repo follows its remote's default branch, whatever it is called. A fresh machine is one dkb update away from the same knowledge base. dkb status exits 1 while a declared repo has no clone, so it doubles as a drift check.

// ~/.config/dkb/config.json
{
  "repositories": {
    "next.js": { "url": "https://github.com/vercel/next.js.git", "paths": ["docs"] },
    "tailwindcss.com": { "url": "https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com.git", "paths": ["src/docs"] }
  }
}

Upgrading from dkb 2: the catalogue used to live in the data dir as one file with the state mixed in. dkb 3 refuses to run while that file exists and prints where each half goes.

Features

• ✨ Auto-naming - No need to specify names, automatically derived from repositories
• 🎯 Path-specific URLs - Add only the docs you need: dkb add owner/repo/path
• 🔗 Multiple URL formats:
  • Full URLs: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/tree/main/docs
  • Shorthand: tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/src/docs
  • Classic: https://github.com/denoland/docs.git
• 🏠 Gitea/Forgejo support - Works with codeberg.org and self-hosted forges: dkb add https://code.haverbeke.berlin/wordgard/website/src/branch/main/site/docs
• 📦 Version tracking - Track versions from a different repository with --version-url
• 🚀 Parallel updates - All repos update concurrently with live progress spinners
• ⚡ Smart skip - Unchanged repos detected via git ls-remote without cloning
• 📂 Sparse checkout - Repos with paths only fetch the files they need
• 🤖 Claude Code skill - Maintains ~/.claude/skills/dkb/SKILL.md; the always-visible description indexes the catalogue so the agent knows what's cached without running anything

Roadmap

• Local repos - dkb add ~/Developer/my-lib symlinking the live checkout into the cache, so first-party libraries in the catalogue point at the working copy instead of a lagging remote clone